DIRECTIONS:
Go in by the entrance at the corner of Buchanan B & C blocks (across from Buchanan Tower). Up the stairs to the very top–3rd floor. There will be a door and stairs leading further up (B500 on plaque by door).

Of potential interest to anyone working on or interested in medieval studies, literary studies, literary criticism and theory, the history of the book, book production, ethics, and issues of human identity and subjectivity and human/animal interactions; and with implications for ecocriticism and environmental studies. All are welcome, and we look forward to interesting questions and stimulating discussion.

Sarah Kay is Professor of French and a specialist in medieval French and Occitan literature. She joined the department of French and Italian at Princeton in 2006 and has been its Chair since 2008. She was trained at the University of Oxford in the UK, and taught at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge. At Cambridge she was head of the department of French (1996-2001) and Director of Graduate Studies (2003-5); she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004, awarded the degree of Litt.D (Cambridge) in 2005, and admitted as Chevalier dans l’Ordre des palmes académiques in 2006.

Her major publications are an edition of Raoul de Cambrai and four monographs on various aspects of medieval literature of which the most recent is The Place of Thought. The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (UPenn Press, 2007). She also co-edited a number of books including, with Simon Gaunt, The Troubadours. An Introduction (Cambridge, 1999) and The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (Cambridge, 2008). With Malcolm Bowie and Terence Cave she co-wrote A Short History of French Literature (Oxford, 2003). Her interest in modern thought and theory lead her in 2003 to publish the first monograph in English on the work of Slavoj Zizek.

Her current research is on the relationship between poetry and knowledge in late medieval France: a 4-year collaborative project, funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, entitled ‘Poetic Knowledge in Late Medieval France,’ which documents and analyzes the role of poetry in transmitting and shaping knowledge in the later Middle Ages in France. As part of her involvement with this project she is writing a short book on the influence of quotations from the troubadours on the development of the European lyric, entitled Parrots and Nightingales. Troubadour Quotations and the European Lyric. She is co-writing (with Adrian Armstrong) the major work to come out of the project, a volume synthesizing the results of the research project as a whole, provisionally entitled Poetry and Knowledge in Late Medieval France. She is further involved in other collaboratively written works and in advising the other members of the team on their sole- authored works. She is also co-writing a book on Chrétien de Troyes together with Virginie Greene, Sharon Kinoshita, Peggy McCracken, and Zrinka Stahuljak.